Standing at the Door: Reflections on the Daughters of the Second Wave

Abstract

Although there are many similarities between the young women Susie Orbach describes and their counterparts in the northeastern United States, there are also complexities and multiplicities in their behavior and expression of aggression, their experience of themselves and of each other, that require us to reach beyond a comfortable intergenerational grasp. These daughters of women who came of age in the feminist movement are members of their own quite globalized youth culture with its own construction of “girls” in an era when aggression is everywhere more explicit and relationships with parents have been shaped by economic and social changes. We do not really know how concepts, like merged attachment, that were so critical to our liberation and coming of age, are relevant to the experience of these young women. It is a question to explore in a cultural context that is more familiar to them than it is to us, their parents.

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Martha Hadley

Martha Hadley, Ph.D., is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Smith College, teaching psychodynamic theory in the master's and doctoral programs at the Smith College School of Social Work, and does applied research on children, technology, and media at the Michael Cohen Group LLC.